So tonight I finally sent my letter asking for a debate on the Digital Economy Bill, if you need some background Matt, Richard and @JimboGunn made better points than I could make about why the bill in its current form would disastrous.

A Weekly summary
Something I’ve done at work for a few years now. Seems lots of folks have started doing this recently on their blogs. I’m not sure if I do enough to do a summary every week, maybe everuy month make more sense. Which leads smoothly into…

Blog more
Being able to write better or at least faster is something I’ve been meaning to work on for a while, which is only going to happen if I practice (via Hacker News), only six post in the last year is pretty bad, plus like others say (via Hacker News again), I find writing ideas down does help me think about ideas and development them more.

Hopefully all this creating things will give me some cool stuff to blog.

More work on my family’s holiday villa
I seem to be taking over more and more of the day to day work plus the website really needs a revamp and I have some new ideas from my OU courses. Running as business has taught me more about business than working as an employee for ten years did and being able to try out idea right away has been a good learning experience, some worked well, some worked a little, some didn’t really work but I learnt so much from each one.

Read more books
I used to used to read so much, at least a book a week, but I got out of the habit, this year I’m going to try to get back into it. I’m still working not sure the best way to go about this, setting some target but the way Derek Sivers list them on his site seem like I nice idea for non-fiction.

Side projects
So early last year I setup a tumblr on building, Pied-à-terre as a scrapbook of ideas and details for houses plus as a testbed for the platform so I could work out how to best use the tool.

Towards the end of the year I ended up setting up a second one covering some demos I like and to stop them swamping my twitter account, The Demo Scene

The plan for this year is to updated the regularly, have a post a day on each for the year on Pied-à-terre. I’m not sure I’ll be able to find 365 demos to post so I don’t want to set the same limit on The Demo Scene but we’ll see what I find.

Just a very incomplete list of cool things from a the last year in a very random order.

Elevated by Rgba & TBC
I’ve been a big fan of demos for a long time but this was something special. All this in 4K, I even ended up starting a tumblr on the demoscene if you like this sort of thing.

Starfleet finally on DVD. It was huge when I was growing up and still stands up today.

Rymdreglage – 8-bit trip chiptunes and lego, lots of clever bits you only spot of the second viewing, so impressed by all the hard work they put into the video.

Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue another chiptune project, but really trying to push things. You could tell from the first post about it that it was going to be special. (Listen to the trailer)

Silhouettes Of Jazz, Love the technical way they used shadow casting to draw images combined into a nice film with a cool soundtrack, for me this was the highlight of the SIGGRAPH Bristol Animation Festival, really worth a look.

Pixel City In a former life I did lots of procedural generation (mostly terrain and planets), so seeing this very cool project was a really blast from the past and really got me thinking about doing some computer graphics again.

Bathcamp really lives up to its tagline ‘ideas and interesting people’, all credit to to Mike and the rest of the crew.

Dropbox Just made sharing files between my desktop and laptop as easy as it always should have been. Windows, Mac and Linux, slick interface that stays out of your way until you need it.The freemium model works really well, with extra storage for referring people, discounts for paying for a whole year upfront. If you use more than one computer you need this.

Spotify much like dropbox, this is slick, doesn’t get in the way, and helped me listen to loads of new (to me) music since I installed the application. They still have some holes in the catalogue and yes the ads can be annoying, they don’t give a discount if you paid for a whole year but the experience of just being able to listen to pretty much any track right away is compelling.

DIY Masters is such a nice idea and really helped start think about a structure for all those things I want to learn and just taking the life long learn thing a little more seriously.

While working on my last Open Universitycourse we were asked to talk about different software development methods with a focus on agile. I may have gone a little over the top and the post ended up being about 1000 words,so i thought I’d put it up here.

So I first learnt about Ada Lovelace day on del.icio.us and signed the pledge, and then spent a long time thinking about who I should write about, Ada Lovelace seems a little like the safe option. Being a hardware architect in a former life and still working on embedded platforms, Lynn Conway seem to be the perfect choice to for me to write about.

I’m guessing many people will not have heard of her, but nearly everyone will have benefited from her work. She worked on out of order execution at IBM, is used in most CPU today. Not to get too technical but exploiting the parallelism of the units inside a CPU, you can get a much greater throughput, so programs run faster and you do more ‘stuff’ done.

Another large contribution was her work in VLSI design, taking the technology from a handful of companies and giving smaller companies and universities access to the toolbox and a structured method to use them, giving much cheaper and faster prototype, leading to an explosion of companies producing ASICs which powers many consumer electronics products.

Part of reason for picking Lynn was that people who work in the more ‘hardcore’ side of technology, tend be less visible than people working in the web,games or the more user facing part of technology. Not to take anything away from people who work in those areas (I’ve also worked on web projects and games in the past), partly I guess this is because these deeply technical subjects are harder to explain, less visual and well less interesting to most people (or perhaps were telling the stories wrong). So all of this is to say don’t feel limited to ‘acceptable’ career options, if your interested in an area go for it.

So another brain dump about startups in various place. Back in 2001 I had an interview in Helsinki for Bitboys. In the end I did not take the job but it did give an interesting look inside the local start up scene when we went out for drinks in the evening.

The big names in the local scene were Bitboys (graphics hardware), Futuremark ( benchmarking software) and Remedy Entertainment ( games), all of which came from the core members of Future Crew. Alot of the other people were friends or at least other people from the demoscene.

The attitude was very different everyone seem to have the same idea that if one of the companies made it big, then they would all make it in some way. They also had very low burn rates, Bitboys only used around two million over five or six years, which when production cost for a test chip (which they made more than one) can be in the $100,000, is very good. They used cheap simple office without any fancy furniture, took good but not huge salaries, very different to the dotcom silicon valley big office, lots of money approach. All very low key, very little management. Assembly acted as the big yearly event where everyone caught up. Lots of the other guys played Salibandy each week with other companies and also out drinking on the weekends, all very sociable. Finland also great for cheap places to live with fast broadband for compared to the UK very cheap prices and such a good public transport system you really did not need a car. It had a real buzz about the place.

In a lot of way the Uk seems to be better at being the best in a niche not in the mass market. If you take cars as an example, lots of racing cars are developed here or use British staff, Prodrive in rallying and endurance racing and Mclaren in F1, plus all the various small sports car people, Lotus and TVR.

Should we in Bristol, the UK or elsewhere be aiming to create a few blockbuster startups to sell out to some large company a few years down the line or instead working to produce an good environment for a much larger number of smaller lower key businesses. Having a nice, say 5 to 10 person business. That gives everyone a nice lifestyle good work life balance as the goal. With maybe the chance one of these smaller companies does end up going huge.

I guess this is the movie industry model, the big studios with the blockbusters, only a few of which pay off vs. the indie films which cost less, so need to sell less tickets/DVD/downloads to make a profit.

If you only define success as making million of pounds then you have the blockbuster high risk route, but if you define success as being paid decent money to work on interesting problems then you many be happier taking a lower risk route with still the chance of the millions and a profile that seem a better fit for what the Uk is good at.

Anyway this is just a quick brain dump of what popped into my head after the twitter thread, I’m sure I’ll have more thought in the future and probably end up changing my mind.